How to Go From Expert to 'Activator' and Future-Proof Your Firm

In today’s market, there are two types of consultants: those who passively wait for the phone to ring, hoping their reputation brings in the next deal, and those who proactively shape their clients’ thinking and create their own opportunities. One is struggling; the other one is building a future-proof book of business. So what’s the real difference? Well, one is an Activator.

I’m here with Matt Dixon, author of the well-known book The Challenger Sale, and the researcher who literally wrote the book on this topic. He studied thousands of people working in professional services, and that includes many, many consultants, to decode what the absolute best are doing differently. So don’t go anywhere because Matt is about to give you the three core mindsets of a top performer and show you how to shift from just being an Expert to becoming the Activator your clients truly and deeply value.

In this episode you will learn:

• The single biggest mistake experts make in sales conversations.

• Why the most important “conversation” happens before you ever speak to a prospect.

• How to scale a service business with a team of coaches without sacrificing quality.

• The philosophical shift from chasing revenue to embracing “continuous growth.”

• The Four Conversations model for a more authentic and effective sales process.

• The common trap of “moving down market” and why it rarely works.

• How to leverage AI as a powerful tool while understanding its limitations.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Matt Dixon is a world-renowned expert on sales and customer experience. As a founding partner of DCM Insights and a frequent Harvard Business Review contributor, his research has shaped modern business strategy through bestselling books like the modern classic The Challenger Sale, The JOLT Effect, and his newest work, The Activator Advantage. As a sought-after speaker and advisor to management teams around the globe, his data-backed frameworks help companies attract, retain, and grow their customers.

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Hey Matt, welcome.

Hey Michael, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah, thank you for coming back, and I’m excited about the conversation. I want to dive right into your latest book and the research that you’ve done, which really has shown or reveals the fundamental assumptions that many consulting firms have really built their businesses on is now broken. And so, I thought it’d be great if you could start off just sharing, like, fundamentally what has changed about how clients are buying professional services?

Yeah, absolutely. So thanks again for having me and giving me a chance to tell folks a little about the research. Hopefully, I won’t make listeners regret having clicked on this episode. We’ll make it entertaining, too. I know it doesn’t sound entertaining because it’s research, but it will be.

So, I think it’s a great jumping-off point before we get into some of what we found around what top rainmakers are doing differently today. And I said before we started – before we hit record – I said to you, Michael, I think if we had done this research 30 years ago, we probably would have found something very different in terms of what best partners, what best business developers are doing to win, retain, and grow client relationships. But I think to simplify, and maybe overly simplify, the axis upon which the professional services industry has spun – so not just consulting, but law, accounting, search, investment banking, marketing, advertising, you name it, any industry where we’re selling advice and where we consider ourselves doer-sellers, professionals – the axis upon which that industry has spun for, I would say, 100 years now has been the trusted advisor model. The belief that if we do great work for our client and if we build a great relationship with our client, they should be expected to come back over and over and over again for follow-on work.

And I think that’s why the incumbent advantage has been so huge in this industry for so long. It’s just really, really hard – it has been historically – to dislodge an incumbent consulting firm. When your client’s happy with the work their current firm does, if they like the partners and the team there, it’s just very hard to get them out and win that client for yourself. But that’s all changing. So, we ran, as part of this overall research study, we ran a, we put together a client panel. So these were C-level buyers. These are people who hire consultancies; they hire accounting firms, law firms, and the like. Think everyone from CEO, GMs, COOs, CFOs, heads of corp dev, general counsel, CMOs, et cetera. And we asked them a battery of questions, but I think the most interesting thing that came out of this is we asked them, “Think about the last professional services purchase you made. So, it might be a legal matter, it might be a transformation project for which you hired a consulting firm, whatever. But think about that last project. Provided the firm that you hired did a good job and provided you’ve got a good relationship with them, would you go back to them again if you had a new need that was aligned with that firm’s capabilities?”

It won’t surprise any of your listeners that five years ago, about 75% of those buyers said, “Sure, yeah, why not?” Right? Because it’s a lot of work to go find a new firm. You’ve got to educate them on who you are and what you do, and that’s just a dead lift for a client. It’s a lot of work. So about 75% of clients raised their hand and said, “Yeah, we’d go back to the same firm again.” Today that number is about 50%. It’s a little bit north of 50%, and just to be clear, that doesn’t mean the incumbent firm won’t win the client’s business, but what it does mean is they won’t automatically get the client’s business. They won’t be given to them. They will have to compete for it, going up against other firms, boutique niche providers, alternate service providers, as well as name competitors they’re very familiar with to win the client’s business – business that in the past we used to get automatically, now we’re competing for it.

And then we ask clients to think about how this is likely to change five years from now, and only about a third of clients were willing to say, “Yeah, we’ll go back to the same firms again.” Now, I admit, asking people what they’re going to do five years from now is an inexact science at best. However, when we went back and we actually interviewed some of the folks who were on this panel and we asked them to give voice to their responses, we heard things like, there’s just in today’s environment where there’s so much pressure on cost, procurement that once was only vetting hard goods that we would buy – materials that we would buy, raw inputs – today, they’re in there mucking around with professional services spend as well. You look at law and the rise of legal operations, it’s like the general counsel got their own procurement department to vet and really put the screws to outside counsel. You’ve got the rise of boutique and niche providers, alternate service providers that a number of years ago were really only competing for the low-end work, the kind of stuff we didn’t want to do, and today they’re showing up competing for higher-end work that the kind of work that the top-tier consulting firms used to get automatically.

So, there’s a lot driving this. And one of the things – I actually heard this from a buyer just the other day – who was talking about how great it is to be a C-level executive with the power of AI in their hands. And what they meant specifically was back in the day, if you had a need, again, it was a lot of work to go think about who else can help me with this need. You’d just go back to the same firm you’d used in the past because it’s the path of least resistance, especially if you like them and if they’ve done good work. But today, the path of least resistance is to drop your need into ChatGPT, and then you get a whole list of firms that can all address those needs, right? Firms you’ve heard of, firms you’ve never heard of before. Then you can ask ChatGPT to put an RFP together for you and then give you a range of fees that you’re going to be likely to have to pay for this and tell you what terms and conditions you can press the provider on. And so, it’s really, the client is really empowered with information that allows them to scan the landscape, allows them to compete vendors against one another in a way that they never did before. So I would say this old model of “do good work and clients will just keep coming back to you over and over again” – today it’s more like, “do good work, and the best you can hope for is an invitation to compete for the next piece of work, but you’re definitely not going to get it automatically.”

[07:12] – Procurement, AI & Risk Optics Forcing Re-Bids

You answered so many questions there, Matt, that I had for you in one fell swoop.

Well, all my answers are like 15 minutes long.

That was good; it’s valid. You’re setting some really important context for people. When I read through the different percentages – I think my numbers were slightly, I think you said 75%, I think I had 76% – but let’s call it 76%, 53%, 37%.

Exactly.

And I agree, looking- nobody knows what’s going to happen in five years, but there’s a clear, what appears to be a trend, of that percentage going down pretty significantly. I know you talk about procurement is now more involved in different areas, that buyers also have access to AI. I guess the real question I still have for you is, why? What do you think – and maybe you saw this in the research – but what’s really driving this? The, if you’ve worked with somebody, they’ve done great work, what’s the impetus? What’s the real reason for somebody to say, “You know what, I’m going to now…I’ve worked with somebody, I trust them, they did great work, but now I want to go out and see if there’s somebody else that could do it better, or is it about cost?” What’s the real driver of why somebody would take the extra time? Even if they’re using AI, it still takes time to use AI and to go through that process. Even if it’s talking to their procurement department, that’s still resource time for procurement to figure things out. So, what do you believe is the real driver behind that?

That’s such a great question. And I do a lot of these podcasts, as you know, Michael, and I’ve never been asked that question before, so it’s really, it’s kind of stumped me a little bit, but I think there’s a lot going into that. There’s one thing that came to mind right away as you were asking me that question, which is that back in the day, I think professional services spend was a bit of a black box. It was something that C-level executives had access to those budget dollars. They could deploy them to their chosen providers, right? So if I’m the CEO or the Head of Corp Dev and I really like this investment bank or I really like this executive search firm, I really like the partner at this consulting firm, everyone kind of looked the other way and just let you go with that. Now that procurement’s in there – I think it’s not just procurement, which, to your point, is resources that the company has to spend, right? It’s arguably harder for them to shop around than it is to just go back to the well. But I think it’s also the optics of it, to be honest with you.

There was a quote in the book about- there was a CEO who said, “If I’ve got a close personal relationship with a partner or a firm, I actually recuse myself from the decision.” So, think about that. This was the thing that partners aspired to for decades: get into the C-suite, get into the corner office, build that relationship with the top of the house, and then those people would put their thumb on the scale for you. Now, just the optics of that – I mean, think about all of the high-profile companies that have been burned by going with X, Y, or Z consulting firm or accounting firm or law firm. And I just think that today, senior executives are saying, “There’s so much scrutiny. Everybody is just waiting for me to slip up and to step on a landmine or fall into a pitfall that I’ve got to be so careful that I actually can’t put my thumb on the scale. It can’t be seen to be doing that because imagine I did that because I’m golfing buddies with the partner from this consulting firm and things go south and they give us bad advice and bad things happen. Right? That comes back to me because I’m the one who pushed for that person to get the work. But so what I’m going to do is I’m going to take a step back and I’m going to tell my team and I’m going to tell procurement, ‘You guys run your process and you guys decide. If you want my opinion, I’m here to give it to you.’” But they abdicate that decision, or they delegate that decision, I should say, down.

And I think in some ways it’s a shift in leadership culture from top-down hierarchical leadership to more networking, consensus-based leadership. Today’s leaders don’t rule by fiat, generally speaking. Today’s leaders ascend to their position and they retain that position because they are able to build consensus amongst their teams. And so, I think part of it is a shift in leadership culture. I also think it’s very hard to get away with this stuff anymore. And so, the newspaper is littered with train wreck stories of when people did put their thumb on the scale and said, “We’re going to go this way or that way, and I’m not going to vet this, and I’m not going to ask anyone else’s opinion. I’m going to do it because this is what I want.”

It feels almost like a compliance component to a degree. And I wonder, in your research and also just through your conversations with buyers – I know you talk to a lot of different people in the C-suite and so forth – is this really more of an enterprise, much larger organization issue, or would this also apply to mid-market and buyers in that mid-market space?

[12:03] – Enterprise vs. Mid-Market Buying: Committees vs. Cost Pressure

I think it stands to reason that this is a problem that’s probably most acute when you get to the higher levels. We did another body of research a number of years ago where we looked at the growth of buying committees, and this is true for, if you’re buying laptops for your employees or if you’re buying legal services, right, or thinking about hiring a consulting firm. The buying committees have grown exponentially over just the past 10 years. When we did our study back in 2015, we saw the size of the average buying committee was about five and a half stakeholders. When I share that with partners from consulting firms, they laugh at that number. They say, “Well, my latest engagement, I had five and a half committees that each had five and a half people on them.” Right? It’s like herding cats. And so it becomes really difficult. I think that is a phenomenon of big companies and compliance and procurement and more scrutiny and more risk aversion, candidly, amongst those buyers.

I know you and I connected over The Jolt Effect, a book we wrote which really is about this deep-seated fear, even up to the highest level of the company, that buyers have that they might make the wrong decision. I actually think that’s a little bit of what’s motivating this too, Michael. It’s like, I know you did great work in the past, but are you going to do great work again? And I need to spread the blame in case the provider, the consulting firm we hired doesn’t do a great job. So I need to be able to say it wasn’t me. We went through a rigorous process. We shopped the entire market. We competed them against one another. We listened to what they had to say and we as a team picked that vendor. And so we are all culpable in that loss. But I think to your question, when you get down-market, I think there the problem becomes a little bit different. I don’t think in the smaller businesses it’s five committees of five- with five people on them each. I don’t think that’s really the issue, but I do think the issue is scrutiny around cost and wanting to be super efficient with spend. You think about a lot of these founder-driven businesses where it’s not the company’s money, it’s actually the founder’s money that’s going in to hire that consulting firm or that law firm or that accounting firm. And so they are looking for every angle possible to go with somebody who could deliver the same level of service but for less money. And so I think it’s almost like the thunderdome of cost efficiency down there. Whatever it is, I think it suffices to say for the average partner today, it is a more competitive, difficult client-buying environment.

I mean that last comment that you just made makes me feel – as somebody that works with a lot of consulting business founders – that it creates an advantage for them compared to maybe years past where, I think you even touched on this a little bit, that smaller firms are now in a position and they are actively competing with larger firms. They’re actually taking business away from some of the bigger firms where in the past maybe that wasn’t the case. What do you think is causing that, and what have you seen to maybe support that?

[14:50] – How Boutiques Outcompete Big 4 on Focus & Risk

I had a conversation with one of the Big 4 partners from a Big 4 consulting firm, and they were familiar with this work we did around the Jolt Effect, which is really about loss aversion and why people, you know, why we lose deals to no decision, and why do clients ghost us after they say they want to move forward and then they go radio silent, disappear. And of course, we now know one of the things they worry about is fear of failure. And this Big 4 consultant was saying to me, “It’s really great to be one of the Big 4 because it’s the old saying, ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM.'” I said, “Well, that’s true. However, if you think about the things that lead to indecision and fear of failure, it’s choice overload – not whether we work with this firm, but how do we work with them. They’ve got so many offerings, so many capabilities. It’s information overload and it’s a fear that, it’s expectations overload, fear that we won’t fully get what we’re paying for.” So let me walk through this with a Big 4 firm. Do you think you offer more options of services and different capabilities a client can take advantage of? Or do you think it’s that boutique firm down the street? It’s clearly the Big 4 firm. It would take them hours. The partners themselves don’t even know all the things that the firm can do.

Right, all the different capabilities, departments.

Yeah, absolutely. Second, information overload. Do you think there’s more coverage of the boutique firm down the street that nobody’s ever heard of or more coverage of you guys? Well, it’s obvious there’s more coverage, more written about both to the good and unfortunately to the bad about those Big 4 firms.

And then lastly, expectations overload. As these Big 4 firms push for bigger, more complex solutions that hit more parts of the client organization, the price point goes up, the risk goes up in the client’s eyes versus going and hiring the boutique firm for this what started as a narrow need. Now I’m talking to the Big 4 firm; it’s a seven-figure engagement or an eight-figure engagement, right? And it’s going to be transformative. And Big 4 consultants love talking transformation, but I always say transformation is a double-edged sword. It’s great, but it’s also really scary and there’s a lot that can go wrong, and people get fired when it goes south, especially when the company spends a lot of money on an engagement like that.

So, in that- with that as context, yes, it’s nice to have the brand and their safety there, and it’s great because you’re always in the consideration set. Those are all benefits, but there is also some benefit in today’s world of being the niche provider, the boutique provider that does a very specific thing for a very fair price, it has a proven track record with that thing, and there’s not a ton of like an internet full of good and bad news that the client’s got to sift through before they decide to hire them. So, it kind of cuts both ways.

We’re going to dive a lot deeper into business development and the profile of the most successful business developer or those that can drive revenue growth. But before we do that, I want to get your take on, given everything you just said about buyers not just going back to the same person they’ve worked with, they’re scrutinizing costs, procurement, all that – what is a consultant to do? What actually works? What should people be thinking about? How can they gain and have an edge when it’s not as, quote unquote, “simple” as it was in the past where you just do great work and you keep having that buyer over and over again?

[18:04] – Lead With Transformative Insight, Not Referrals

The research is pretty consistent on this front that in this world of information overload- so years ago, we wrote a book called The Challenger Sale, and one of the things we talked about was the fact that today’s customers are almost 60% of the way through the buying journey before they ever call the service provider, before they ever pick up the phone and call the partner or the owner of the consulting firm or fill out a form on the website and ask for a meeting or send that LinkedIn note, which is scary, right? And it’s even worse today, I think, with AI. Clients can just, they can figure out the problem they want to solve, who should be on the short list, how do those firms compare to one another, what are their fees, rate cards, et cetera, and then they create a short list and they force these providers to compete on price.

We’ve- there are other trends out there. We talked about growth in buying committees, and then of course the rise in no-decision losses and this risk aversion that clients are feeling which leads to great ideas going nowhere with the client. And so, I think in that context, I think there’s one thing that we found that’s been super, super consistent, is that the thing that, in a world where clients learn on their own, the thing that they’re still willing to make time for and that creates differentiation is the ability of a provider, a vendor, to bring new ideas to the table. It’s actually the same thing that in growing buying groups gets groups to come together. Look, buying groups, we’ve always heard the saying, “Everyone on the buying group committee is empowered to say ‘no’ and nobody is empowered to say ‘yes’.” But the thing that great partners look for is their mobilizer – looking for the person who’s motivated by great ideas because that person will push that buying group to agree on something more than “Let’s do nothing and kick the can down the road.” Right? But that person is motivated not by the brand of your firm or the credentials of your partners; they’re motivated by your idea, your transformative idea for their business. And if you can show it to them and prove it to them and get them bought in, they’ll cash the political chips to get that dysfunctional buying group to move forward in a new and positive direction. Same thing with deals lost to no decision, right? A great way to avoid that is by bringing these new transformative ideas to the table.

Now, this is very consistent with what we found. We’re going to talk about this more with Activators, right? Activators are these partners who are proactively bringing new ideas. And this has been one of these themes that has been consistent in our research from back in 2008, 2009 when we first started the Challenger work. And every time we study this and every time we look at different populations, salespeople versus partners, from the client side, from the sales side, we look at buying committees versus individuals, and the thing that defines high performance, that is characteristic of deals that avoid no decision, avoid dying in committee, that make it through, that end up being high-quality deals are things that really are anchored in unique insight and new ideas. Now, the way we do this, of course, we talk about in the book, is very different in professional services versus sales, and we’re going to get into that, I think. But that is the tie that binds. It’s been really, really consistent. In a world where clients can learn on their own, the thing they still value is the thing they couldn’t learn on their own. And this makes consultants super valuable to clients – the insight they bring, the window they provide on the outside market, their ability to help clients look around corners. As consultants, that is our stock in trade, and it’s super, super valued by clients today.

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That’s a very powerful message. I appreciate you sharing that. So you talk about Activator, right? I know you have five profiles in your book, but the Activator is the only one that really drives revenue growth. What I will do right now is just pull up on the screen- you sent me a visual which I thought was great here, and just to have you speak to it. And those that are just joining the audio podcast here, you can go over to our YouTube channel and you’ll find the video of Matt and I having this conversation and you’ll see the actual visual on the screen. Matt, can you see that right now?

I can see it. Yeah, it’s small because of my terrible eyesight, but I can see it. Since I created it, I wrote about it in the book. I remember it mostly.

Perfect. So I think just having this up, if you could just talk through- This is called the Activator Model. Maybe you could describe to begin, what are the profiles, how does the Activator fit in, what makes them unique, and just anything else that you feel would be important for listeners and those joining us to understand about this model.

[25:20] – Five Rainmaker Profiles Overview

Yeah, let me do that, and then we’ll kind of hot-walk through this and give people a little bit of an orientation to this model. So if I were to take a step back, the Activator Advantage – that’s our new book – and it was based on a study of 3,000 partners. So not just consultants, but we looked at accountants, lawyers – we’ll say law, accounting, consulting were the three biggest segments of the sample population, but we also had investment bankers in there, executive search partners, and PR professionals as well. Now, what we found is, and this is a database study, so we collected data from partners, we collected business development performance data from the firms that these partners work for, right? So we got the leadership of those firms to evaluate each one of those 3,000 partners and ran a whole slew of different types of analysis.

One of the things that came out of this analysis was the fact that there are basically five statistically defined profiles of partners in professional services. Now, I just want to be careful because these are not personalities. I think sometimes when I describe them, people feel like they’re personality-based. They’re not. We looked at behaviors, time-spend characteristics, how these partners use tools and technology, how they leverage the other departments in the firm like BD, marketing, communications, et cetera, how they collaborate or not with their colleagues, et cetera. So we’re looking at the selling part of being a doer-seller, right, of being a consultant – the commercial part, not the execution part. And then we had of course the performance data. It’s not personality-based. This is more about what these partners do day-to-day, not about who they are, if that makes sense.

The second thing, and this is also important before I go through the five, and then of course we’ll talk more about the Activator, one of the five profiles, the one that performs best, is that all of the 3,000 partners, every single one of them, they actually had all five of these profiles. The question listeners should ask themselves, if you’re a consultant, if you’re leading a consulting team, if you’re a founder or CEO or president of a consulting firm, is ask yourself, “Which one of these five do your partners spike in?” So they have all five, but we each spike in one. So think of them more like a university major, if that makes sense.

Okay, so the five are these: we’ve got Experts, Confidants, Debaters, Realists, and Activators.

[27:41] – Inside the Five Profiles: Expert, Confidant, Debater, Realist, and Activator

So very quickly on the other four. The first one is the Expert. So the Expert is kind of a reluctant business developer. There are many consultants who are reluctant business developers. For many consultants, “sales” is kind of a four-letter word.

Matt, when I read this and went through it, the Expert to me stood out as one that I think so many, either solo or boutique consulting firm owners, they would describe themselves and feel most akin to the Expert.

I think you’re right. And I think that is, that is especially true in consulting. I think you find a lot of consultants fall into that profile, and it’s not uncommon. I think, even when you look at Big 4 firms, I think a lot of the individual partners would self-describe as Experts. Now, they may be a part of a bigger firm, but I have my specific area of expertise as a partner. Now, so these folks, again, they don’t like selling, it doesn’t come naturally to them, but as partners they know they’ve got to generate the business, they’ve got to make it rain. And the way they do it is that they broadcast in a one-to-many fashion they broadcast their expertise and credentials to the market. So the way they do that is they do a lot of speaking engagements, they publish thought pieces. If they’re on LinkedIn, they’re usually putting out a point of view, and then they’re waiting for people to follow up and ask for a conversation. “Michael, that was really interesting what you said. Can I hop on a call with you and talk about what you and your firm can do for us?” As one CEO said, “These partners like to aggressively wait for the phone to ring when it comes to their business development approach.” You could tell from that description the CEO was not a big fan of that.

And because it’s so reactive, what ends up happening for the Expert is that they actually get pulled into a lot of RFPs, a lot of tender-driven purchases, a lot of competitive pursuits because in today’s environment especially, by the time the client finds the Expert, they’re usually talking to a few other Experts from competitor firms as well, and then it could be a race to the bottom on price.

The second one is the Confidant. I would actually say, Michael, the Confidant and the Expert are probably the two that I hear most frequently. It depends on the firm, but you find a lot of Confidants, especially in law and accounting. So the Confidant is kind of an old-school trusted advisor. This is not the way that David Maister would describe this profile. I think David would probably say this is a caricature of what he described in his book. But what these folks are doing is trying to build a very, very deep set of- a small but deep set of client relationships. So think like three to four key clients. What they’re trying to do is basically milk these clients for lots of follow-on work. And the way they do that is that they deliver- they do three things. One, they deliver great work products. So these people really do take a lot of pride in the quality of the work that they and their teams deliver to the client. Two, they provide very responsive client service. So wherever there’s friction in the relationship – so for instance, if the client’s upset about an invoice or the way a part of the delivery went – they dive on the grenade, they try to take care of it. They really act as an advocate for the client inside the firm. Third, they try to build not just business relationships, but ideally personal relationships with the client. The number of Confidants I interviewed who said, “Oh, my biggest client, we went to law school together,” or, “I went to business school with that person,” or, you know, “We grew up as friends and now that person is a CEO of a company, I’m a partner in a consulting firm. They’re not just my good friend, but they’re now my client as well.” So what Confidants believe is that if they do all these things, basically what they’re doing is building a moat around the client relationship that makes it impossible for anybody else to steal that client from them.

But that also leads to some bad behavior internally. So again, their mindset is if I do great work, if I’ve got these relationships, if I’m super responsive, the client will keep coming back to me over and over again. It would be unthinkable that that client would go to somebody else, and they should at least come to me and give me first right of refusal on any follow-on work. Now, the dark side of the Confidant is inside the firm, they can have very sharp elbows, so they don’t put any notes in the CRM system, they get really upset when other people call into their clients. So, we’re smiling because you know some of these people, like we know these people in our career. Some of them have been very, very successful in their careers, but they really do live in fear of what might happen if they bring a colleague in – no matter how talented and credentialed – and that colleague rocks the boat with their client. And if that happens, like, “I just don’t have very many of these personal ATM machines, so I can’t have you break one of them.” So, they have very sharp elbows inside the firm.

The third one is the Debater. You don’t actually- these are- this is probably the smallest percentage – it is the smallest percentage of the population. Only about 17% of partners fell into this profile, and you’ll understand when I describe them. Debaters are sharp-elbowed, opinionated know-it-alls. So, their business development approach is to come in and tell the client, “You’re thinking about this all wrong. You’re thinking about that opportunity in completely the wrong way.” Now, it’s a strange way to sell, if you will, in professional services, but what’s interesting about this approach is when we wrote The Challenger Sale, this book we wrote back in 2011 about B2B salespeople, that profile was actually the winning profile for B2B sales. So it’s kind of interesting to see that this Debater, who’s kind of akin to the Challenger, does really well in B2B sales, doesn’t do very well in professional services. And the reason why is it’s okay to be a Challenger, to tell your client they’re doing it wrong when you’re selling a product, but if you are the product, as we are in consulting, that’s a really tough posture to adopt. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell clients when they’re getting it wrong, but it does mean we have to pick and choose our moments to do that. And clients are very clear, like, “Look, part of the reason I hire you and I pay you a lot of money is I need you to tell me if I’m heading down the wrong path, but if every time I sit down with you, you’re telling me I’m doing it wrong, I don’t have time or patience for that. It’s exhausting.”

The fourth one is the Realist. The Realist is kind of the – this is also going to sound like a strange way to sell business – is the glass-half-empty partner. So, they’re very focused on telling clients, “This engagement you’re hiring me for, it’s going to take twice as long as you think, it’s going to cost twice as much as you budgeted, and the impact is probably going to be half as great as you’re hoping for.” Now, you might ask why on earth would they do that, but what these Realists will tell you is they know that every client out there has been left holding the bag by a consultant. They’ve been sold a bill of goods. The consultant has over-promised and under-delivered, things cost twice as much, they took twice as long, the impact didn’t materialize, et cetera. And so these partners try to separate themselves by being the exact opposite. They want to be the transparent, truthful, above-board brokers with the client. And clients, these people do okay when you look at the performance data. Clients like the honesty, but they don’t love the negativity. So they want the partners they hire, the consultants they hire, to, you know, “Yes, I know it could take twice as long, but what if we really lean into it? How fast could we get this done?” Right? Paint the art of the possible for me.

It sounds like being around somebody who’s just negative all the time as opposed to somebody who’s more positive. It’s like, who do you typically get drawn to? Hopefully it’s the person that’s more positive.

Yeah, and I think that’s part of it too, right? Because if you think about that Debater or the Realist, in part what we’re selling, yeah, we’re selling expertise, but we’re also selling a relationship. We’re not going away. It’s not like B2B sales where the salesperson sells you a medical device or a piece of software and then they disappear. You’re selling a relationship which is going to last some time through the course of the consulting engagement or the legal matter, and if you’re negative all the time or if you’re constantly telling your client they’re doing it wrong, the client’s not really going to want to spend time with you.

Okay, so that leaves the Activator. So, the Activator – first, I’ll say when we look at performance, what you find is you can be a top rainmaker in any of the five profiles, but the probability of being a top rainmaker is not the same across the five. The greatest probability of being a top performer is the Activator profile. And actually, when we look at a regression analysis that we did, if you went from not very good to very good on Activator time spend, Activator behaviors, Activator skills and techniques, use of resources, et cetera, you could lift the size of your own book of business by up to 32%, which is a really big number. So then the question is: okay, who are these people? What are they doing and what makes them different? So, maybe you can pull up the framework here, Michael, and I’ll talk through it a little bit.

So let me say, before we go through it, I’ll give a high-level description of these folks, just like I did for the other four. So, Activators, the first thing I would say about an Activator is that they are super-connectors. Okay? So these folks are very active on LinkedIn – not the way an Expert is. So yeah, they do post points of view and “come hear me at this conference” and “check out this video I recorded” or “this white paper I wrote.” They do that stuff, but that’s not most of what they do; it’s the minority of what they do. Most of what they’re doing on LinkedIn is using LinkedIn actually as if it’s the world’s biggest business conference. They’re connecting, they’re liking, they’re sharing, they’re engaging. And actually, when you ask Activators, what they’ll say is, “I’m not looking to sell anything on LinkedIn. In fact, what I’m trying to do is get the conversation off of LinkedIn. So let’s start there, but let me get the email, then maybe a Zoom or a Teams call, then maybe do a coffee or a dinner or lunch, and then maybe do a client event, and then we can talk about paid work, right?” So they’re trying to move it from the virtual world to the live world.

But speaking of live, these are the folks who at client events or industry conferences, where a lot of the partners will kind of clump in the corner with their colleagues and wait for clients to approach them, these folks do the exact opposite because what they know is an event is the most concentrated BD moment of the year for them. And so they come in with a game plan. They know who’s coming to the event, they’ve set up the coffees and lunches and dinners, and they’ve got a target list of who they want to talk to and collect a business card from, et cetera. Now, somebody asked me the other day, “Okay, so why didn’t you call them ‘connectors’?” because that’s what they’re doing. And I think that is part of what they’re doing, but I actually think the really exciting part is what happens next, is that they look to activate those connections and turn them into paying clients.

[37:48] – Pay-It-Forward BD: Deliver Value Before the SOW

And how do they do that? Well, what they do is they proactively bring new ideas to clients, new ways to make – and this is that insight idea we talked about earlier – new ways to make money, new ways to save money, new ways to mitigate risk, risks that the client isn’t even aware of perhaps, how to capture market share, how to win the war for talent, whatever the objective is that your listeners are focused on for their clients, they’re showing up with new ideas about how to make that happen. Now, what’s so interesting about this is that when they do that, when they proactively bring these insights, these ideas to clients, they’re not charging them for it. They’re instead- they’re paying it forward with the client.

So they’re doing a couple things here. One, they want to be seen by the client as the person who was helpful and thoughtful enough to proactively bring a new idea or opportunity to them. Right? Everyone else is waiting for you to call them. I was thoughtful enough to say, “Michael, I know you participate in this market. I’m not sure if you saw that recent M&A transaction, but we’ve been looking at how that’s going to reshape the competitive landscape. We’ve got a point of view I’d love to share with you.” Right? I’m not going to send you an invoice for that time, but I’m going to, again, pay it forward. The other thing is we know consulting is a black box purchase, right? You can’t demo it, you can’t do a proof of concept. And so this gives the client an opportunity to kick the tires on the consultant as an advisor. “What’s it going to be like to work with you? Give me a sense for your skills, your chops.” And then lastly, and this is probably the most important reason they do it, is they’re looking to shape the client’s understanding of an opportunity, ideally in a way that leads to them. So even if you decide you’re going to go talk to 10 different providers and you’re going to put together an RFP and we’re going to have to compete for this work, I’ve got a leg up because I’m the one who shaped your understanding of the idea, ideally in a way that you would value our unique capabilities relative to other firms or other consultants out there.

Now, the last thing I’ll say about the Activator, and then I’ll talk you through this model a little bit, is that unlike the Confidant who’s trying to box people out of their client relationships, Activators are looking to bring their colleagues in. So they know that in a world where clients are less loyal today than they once were, you are way better off as a consultant if you can shift the client’s loyalty from “me” to “we.” Right? How do I make the client loyal to the firm? Yeah, it’s my client, right, but it needs to be our client. And when it’s our client and my colleagues in other practice groups are helping the client across multiple different initiatives, projects, needs, et cetera, you’re creating a much stickier relationship, right? Because it’s the kind of relationship- look, if the client’s only buying from you, that’s easy come, easy go. They go buy from somebody else the next time they have a similar need. But if your firm is engaged across a half dozen different initiatives with the client, that’s a lot of work to cut the cord and go with somebody else. Right? This is a firm that really knows you at a deep level, and that’s costly to sever those ties.

From what you’re describing, it feels like or sounds like that there’s a distinction between an Activator is patient and they have a very long-term mindset, whereas many in consulting are often trying to sell at every opportunity. I’m wondering, is that what you’ve seen as well, or could you speak to that?

It’s funny you say that because in an earlier incarnation of these names – so all of this is statistically derived, of course, but the names themselves we came up with because we’re just trying to think of labels that would be sticky, that people would associate with. But one of the early versions was the “patient seller,” right, or the “patient partner.” And I think patience is a big part of it. One Activator told us, “Look, my billable work, my paying clients, that pays my bonus this year, but it’s all the free work I’m doing that’s going to pay my bonus next year and the year after that and the year after that.” Right? So again, this pay-it-forward, patient mindset.

Now, I think there’s also something you hit on here that’s really important. A lot of consultants don’t like selling. It’s not why they got into consulting. They want to help people, they want to leverage their expertise, they like working on these projects for clients. The sales part of it is their least favorite part of the job. But what’s so interesting is when we talk to Activators, the number of them that said they don’t like sales either, I thought was pretty surprising because they’re so good at it compared to all the other partners. And when we dug into this a little bit, I think we realized what’s going on here is that for them, it really isn’t sales. Let me explain. I think most partners are exactly the way you described, which is, “I will build a relationship with you and I will deliver value to you after you sign the SOW or after you agree to hire me.” Right? Then the value will flow and the relationship will be deep. But Activators kind of reverse that. They reverse the polarity a little bit. So what they’re doing is trying to deliver value and build a relationship which then leads to paid work. So for an Activator, it doesn’t really feel like a hard ask. It doesn’t even really feel like selling because in their mind, it’s just a natural evolution of a value-based relationship that’s already been formed.

Somebody told me the other day, I thought it was a great analogy, and I think we use it in the book, something like this: if you think about your spouse, significant other, you probably didn’t approach them on the street and then say, “Hey, would you marry me? Would you like to spend the rest of your life together with me?” Probably you met them, you maybe were friends first, and then you dated, and then maybe you lived together, and then you got to know their family, and then you were engaged, and then you got married, right? But popping the question is a natural evolution when you’ve already laid the groundwork. And I think that’s how the Activator thinks. And so for them, again, it doesn’t even really feel like sales, which is this hard gearshift. It feels like a natural extension.

Now, it’s an important counterpoint here because I hear this a lot from partners, is I’ve got to- especially in industries like law where they have billable hours, right, and they have billable hour requirements in their firms. But for most of us, we have, in consulting, we have a delivery requirement. And it’s hard to think about, “How do I do free work for people when I’ve got to deliver paid work because that’s what my bonus is going to be based on?” And I think that comes down to this prioritization, which is one of the things we’ll talk about here. And again, I’ll orient people to the framework at the highest level. But prioritization is really key because what Activators are very good at is not getting trapped in the “friend zone” by clients. What I mean by that is there are a lot of clients out there who would like nothing better than to have a very talented consultant on call delivering free advice all the time, right? That’s a great world. But there’s a reason nobody’s in the free consulting business; it’s not a very good business. And so Activators have to be- they are ruthlessly focused on who are the ideal-fit clients that I’m actually going to do some free work for, I’m going to give some free advice or counsel to, and then I’m going to look for reciprocity from that client. And if I don’t see any, if I keep getting these vague promises about hiring me at some vague, unspecified point in the future, I will deprioritize that client, no matter how good a fit they are for me and for my firm. I will deprioritize them and I won’t chase garbage trucks, if you will – not to call clients garbage trucks – but they don’t get trapped in that hope-springs-eternal mode, which a lot of partners I think get stuck in.

Do you think it’s possible for a founder-led boutique firm or even a solo consultant to be an effective Activator? And I ask this because, by definition of what you’ve described – patience, long term, being in a position where you can invest in that relationship, create and deliver significant value over a period of time without monetizing that, if you will – somebody in an organization where they’re being paid a salary, it’s not their money, it’s the organization’s money, and there’s an understanding and an accepted timeline that things will take some time, and the value of those engagements typically are seven, eight figures, in some cases maybe even more, and so it’s worth the payoff of investing that time. But somebody in a boutique firm, if they’re the founder or even, whether it’s one person or 20 people, can they make the Activator model and can they be an effective Activator when they may not have the luxury of investing a year or two years into a relationship before it turns into a paying client?

It’s a great question. I would say ‘yes’, and there’s two reasons I would say that. One, we know that they can because we found them in firms like that. So after we wrote the book, we continued collecting data, and we found Activators in pretty small boutique firms as well. In fact, in many of those firms, we found a higher proportion of Activators than we did in some of the big established firms, which is kind of interesting as well. If anything, I might even argue those folks- you know, one of the things I think people associate with Activators is, yeah, there’s a patience element to it, but if we look at these behaviors, one of the things I’ll talk about here in a moment is their commitment to business development. So an Activator- most partners, I’d say 80% of partners – that number may not be exactly right, but around 80% of the partners in our study – said that they do business development when they get around to it, basically. So what does that mean? That means I do BD when I lose a big client or I lose a big pitch or a competition for an RFP-driven piece of business, or maybe when things are soft and times are tight and I need to get out there and hustle for work. But Activators are doing BD all the time. It doesn’t mean that they’re “sales” partners because they also have delivery expectations, so they’re delivering just as much client work as anybody else, but they have a rhythm and a cadence and a routine around their business development. So for them, business development is always on.

And I would say- I would argue that that is actually more true in a boutique or small founder-led consultancy where, “Hey guys, if we don’t sell business, we’re not eating this week or this month. Right? We got to get out there, we got to sell. There is no cushy salary to fall back on. It literally is ‘eat what you kill’.” So you do find in those firms there is more of a commitment to do business development. But I also think these firms, for them to land a client, develop a deep client relationship, and be able to retain and grow that client over time is super important. And so if they go through and they’re just churning through clients and, like you said, selling at every interaction and putting people off, maybe over-promising and under-delivering, that’s death for a small consultancy. That’s really hard to survive that kind of client churn, and you’re just, you’re laying a foundation of disloyalty, actually, amongst your clients.

Let’s have you walk us through here. And I know, just at a high level, I want to be conscious of time. So high level, if you could just take us through the model here.

[48:21] – The 3Cs of Being an Activator

Yeah, very high level. You know what I’ll do is maybe just orient people to the three- so, since we’re all consultants, consultants love frameworks, and so we went with a mnemonic here: the 3Cs of being an Activator. So, Activators are doing a lot, as you can see from the framework, and again, I’ll hit these at a high level in a moment. But at the very top, if you remember nothing else, there are three Cs to being an Activator: a commitment to business development, which I already spoke about; a connection, an ability to connect broadly and deeply; and then creating value proactively. So just a quick word on each. Again, committing to business development, we talked about that. They don’t let business development fall by the wayside. Now, the reason they don’t, the reason they have this commitment to it, even in big firms, is because they know that client who loves you today, well, they may be somebody else’s client tomorrow. That’s just the way the world works today. Clients are much more disloyal than they used to be. You better have a backup plan, therefore. And a very dangerous thing Activators told us is, “I only assume that my clients are going to stay with me for this long. I hope they stay with me for decades, but I’m safer and it motivates me to be a proactive business developer and a committed business developer if I assume they’re not going to be with me for the long term.”

Now, connecting broadly and deeply. So we talked about how Activators are- really what they’re doing is, and this is another thing I think is really important for smaller firms and these boutiques out there, they are building and managing their professional network as their most important strategic asset because that’s where their paying client relationships come from. In big firms, yeah, partners will get leads from marketing, but most of their paying client relationships come from their own professional network and their ability to harvest clients from that network. So that’s why they spend so much time on LinkedIn. That’s why they’re so maniacal with their time spent at a client event or at an industry conference, right? Because that is what’s feeding this source of business opportunity for them. They connect inside the firm as well, right? They’re connecting with colleagues, they’re trying to bring the breadth of the firm to bear for the client, shift the locus of loyalty from “me” to “we.” And then the last element of connection is connecting within the client organization.

[50:26] – Find the Mobilizer to Move Buying Committees

So, Activators are- most partners really get kind of radar-locked on the senior executive. Like, “I’m going to build a deep relationship with the CMO or the CRO, the GC,” and they kind of ignore everyone else on the team. And their mindset is, “I want to build a top-of-the-house relationship because those are the people who sign the agreement, they’re the people who approve the work, et cetera, and those are the people who are going to sign the next agreement too.” But what Activators know is that senior executives turn over a lot, and their lifespan is actually pretty short. And so what they try to build is a zippered relationship. They don’t ignore the senior-most, but they’re trying to build relationships all the way down into the client organization at the most junior levels. It may not be them personally, it might be junior people on their team, but they’re trying to create this enmeshed relationship. Why? Because when the senior-most gets fired, who steps in is probably the second or third in command who becomes the interim.

Matt, a question for you on that. Did the research or just from what you’ve seen, given what you’re talking about right now, is the Activator- do they typically focus on the initial point of contact in a new organization, so where there’s no relationship, are they still starting by targeting the C-suite and the executives, or are you finding that they’re actually, in most cases, most effective when they get in at a lower level inside the organization and then work their way up?

I think it can vary. So again, I mentioned earlier a piece we wrote where we looked at buying committees and how they’re growing. What we found best sellers, and this is true of partners too, best consultants, is they look for their mobilizer. So, a mobilizer is different from the other types of stakeholders you find. We call them “talkers” and “blockers.” Talkers are who they sound like: great for giving you information, not very good for getting your proposal through. Blockers are who they sound like: they don’t really want to meet with you, they’re very focused on the status quo, and they want to stay the course.

Mobilizers are those stakeholders who get motivated by ideas, and that is our stock in trade as consultants, right? Bringing those new ideas to clients, the things that we know that our clients need to know, bringing those ideas, those transformative opportunities to our clients in a way that the client wants to pay us to do that work for them. Mobilizers are- that is like a dog whistle to a mobilizer. And the thing about mobilizers, it’s interesting, is there’s no correlation on whether a stakeholder is a mobilizer and whether they’re senior or what function they sit in. So you’re just as likely to find a senior decision-maker who’s also a mobilizer as you are to find a senior decision-maker who’s a blocker or a talker, actually. So, what I’d say best consultants, Activators, are really good at is, “Yes, I know I need a relationship with the senior-most. I know at some point this agreement is going to cross their desk, but I also need to hitch my wagon to my mobilizer.” Who’s the person when this thing goes behind committee and the senior executive sits back and says, “I’m going to leave it up to the team,” who is the person who’s going to push their chips into the middle of the table and say, “Guys, we need to move forward and we need to act on this idea because it’s going to be transformative for our business.” Basically, they act as our Activator inside the client organization.

[53:31] – Add Personal Value Beyond ROI to Lock In Loyalty

Now, just one last piece I’ll talk about here: creating value proactively. So this is the idea of bringing ideas to clients before they realize there is an idea that gives you a chance to establish a basis for reciprocity. “I brought this idea to you, and so therefore, you want to reciprocate by doing something good for me – mainly hiring me – but also it allows me to shape your understanding of the idea.”

Now, when it comes to creating value with clients, we should also think about the nature of the value that consultants create. And I would say at the highest level, as consultants, we create three types of value for clients: business value – do we help our client make money, save money, avoid risk?; trust value, meaning do we deliver our work in a trustworthy fashion, above board, in a way that hits and ideally exceeds the client’s expectations, not just the outcomes, but the manner in which we work with the client, right, what it’s like to work with us? Now, those two things, business value and trust value, most consultants would say that’s what it means to be a trusted advisor. You do great work and you do it in a trustworthy fashion. But what Activators recognize is that that’s not enough in today’s market. And the ones we interviewed, so many of the ones we interviewed said right off the bat, “Look, I know everybody talks about being a trusted advisor. That’s all well and good, but I consider myself a trusted advisor, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a trusted advisor, but I don’t have a monopoly on that in my space. There are lots of talented trusted advisors out there.” And so they look to layer on a third source of value which we call personal value. So, personal value is not remembering your client’s birthday or the names of their kids; that’s just being a nice person. This is about understanding what is personally important to your client. So, what are they aspiring to with their business or with their career? What are they struggling with? Like, is it a new boss, a new ownership structure, an underperforming team, or an initiative that’s gone sideways? What are they passionate about outside of work? Causes, nonprofits, foundations? Or maybe things they’re challenged by, like a health struggle, for instance, or a personal struggle of some nature. And Activators are always asking the question, “Is there a way for me to help my client on that stuff that’s outside the scope of paid work?” And when you can do that and move the needle on that, that creates lasting stickiness in the relationship.

It sounds like an Activator needs to be a master of the CRM in order to capture all of these details, to manage these relationships. This is not something that can be done in a spreadsheet; you need to have- and I know your research kind of talks about this in the book in terms of technology and using social in terms of LinkedIn, but is that something that you’ve seen and is at the forefront, the importance of CRMs and managing all that?

Well, what I would say is that every Activator we’ve ever identified in the research has a system. And I think in a lot of firms, that system is a Google Sheet or an Excel sheet or something like that that allows them to organize their network, to think about those clients, to think about different opportunities, to think about, “When was the last time I engaged that client?” and prioritize their time spent, right? I think though, we also see that Activators are heavy users of CRM. So provided the CRM helps them do that effectively, yes, they are big users of CRM, certainly more so than the average consultant. And we all know consulting firms and professional services firms are often where these investments go to die, right? You buy the CRM, you spend a lot of money on it, and none of the partners use it. But that’s not true of Activators. They’re very heavy users of technology. Why? Because it helps them keep, as you’re saying, Michael, their hands around or arms around this big, complex network they’ve built from which they’re trying to harvest paying work.

Is there anything in the model that you definitely want to call out before- I want to ask you one other question related to this, but is there anything about the model that you definitely want to speak to before we-

[57:25] – Build Activator Habits: Resilience, Other-Focus, Self-Determination

Two things. First, as you can see, as those watching the video can see, the 3 Cs are really the high level, right? These are the pillars of the- I’d say foundational elements, even though they’re on the top, of being an Activator: the three Cs. But the book is really about what are they doing day-to-day. So it’s about those rhythms and those workflows they’ve developed. It’s also about the mindsets that they share, and I’ll come back to that one in a moment. And then how do they bring all of this to life in the moments that matter in the client relationship? Everything from when I first meet somebody at an event or on LinkedIn all the way through to bringing an idea to them, maybe earning the right to have a meeting or a coffee or a lunch or dinner, to proposing paid work, negotiating fees, and then dealing with the inevitable setback which, because we’re in an imperfect world, that stuff happens, right?

Now, coming back to the mindsets for a moment, it’s important to share with listeners, these are not personality traits. Mindsets are different from personality traits. Personality traits are very hard, if not impossible, to change, depends on what psychologist you ask. Mindsets are different. Mindsets can be shaped and developed over time. Right? So for anybody who’s ever been in the military, you know that you might have come in and you might not have been very, you know, have a very thick skin. You come out of basic training, you’ve got a very thick skin, you’re much more resilient than you once were. So these are things that can be learned and taught and developed. So the three mindsets that Activators share: one is resiliency, and the reason is, look, even the very top rainmakers, they lose more pitches and they lose more of their BD efforts don’t pan out than the ones that they win, right? So we lose a lot more often than we win, so you need to be resilient. Other-focus. We talked about this before, but Activators, yes, they are Experts themselves, but one of the things they really pride themselves on is being general contractors for expertise. So, I love showing off my colleagues to my clients because I know they’re going to wow the client and I know the client is going to come back to me and one, thank me, and two, say, “I didn’t even know you guys did this. That’s amazing. Thank you for making the introduction.” All I have to do is sit back and take the credit. And then the last one is they’re self-determined. Self-determination is critical. It’s the mindset that my business development success is basically up to me and nobody else. It’s not up to the market, it’s not up to my competitors, it’s really not even up to my clients. If I do what needs to be done, if I do the Activator thing, good things will follow and my book of business will thrive.

That’s really helpful, and of course you cover a lot more of that in the book, a lot more details around that. The question I have for you is: at what point does it make sense for a consulting firm owner to hire and find and hire an Activator as opposed to trying to develop an Activator from within or, I think in many cases for especially smaller firms, that the founder themselves is the most likely candidate to be that Activator? And in that second situation, if it is the firm owner that is going to assume more responsibility and make a commitment to really leaning in to become that Activator, that means that there’s going to be a whole bunch of other things that they’re going to need to shift away from. So that’s a consideration obviously in terms of salary and time spent. So what have you seen and what are your thoughts if you were advising a firm that’s doing a million dollars, $2 million a year, something along those lines, so they’re still quite small, they have limited resources, how might you counsel them on thinking through that?

[01:00:56] – Hiring and Developing Activators to Drive Firm Growth

I think the first thing is that if you look at Activators as a percentage of the population, right, so if you’re thinking about hiring, “I’m going to go out and hire a new consultant into my firm and I want to find an Activator,” well, only 22% of our study were Activators. So going out and finding a ready-made Activator is a low-probability exercise.

There’s no job description that says, “Hiring an Activator.” That doesn’t exist.

Not yet.

As your book continues to become more popular, it might start happening, right?

That’s right. So, but I do think you can screen for the “Activator-ness” in interviews. And actually, there are external markers too, right? You can look at somebody’s LinkedIn profile and you can see, are they active and are they active in the way that an Activator is? You can ask them in an interview in a behavioral sense, “Tell me about a time where you brought an idea to a client that the client didn’t even realize was an opportunity and you shaped their understanding of it. Tell me about how you collaborated with a colleague in your last firm or your current firm to bring the breadth of the firm’s capabilities and solve a more complex issue for your client. How did that happen?” So, we can test for that, and we should test for that.

But I think you can’t avoid the question of how do we actually develop our current folks to be more Activator-like. Now, one of the things that we found is developing professionals like consultants is actually very different from developing salespeople. So again, I came from a long history of studying and writing about salespeople and started up a number of sales training businesses. And I can tell you, sales training is very different. If you’re talking about W-2 employees, you can come and say, “Hey, we’re all going to learn the Challenger methodology, and if you don’t want to do it, there’s the door.” But in partnerships, in consulting firms, these are owners of the business, and even if it’s a private equity-owned consultancy or it’s a publicly traded consultancy, so you’re not really an owner of the business in a partnership sense, in a financial sense, you still are much more autonomous than the average salesperson. So consultants pride themselves on their autonomy. And I think one of the things that we found does not work is getting a group of consultants in a room and saying, “Hey, we’re all going to learn how to be Activators. We’re going to turn you into Activators.” They just reject that like the plague. I think what consultants respond much better to is, “We want you to keep what’s made you successful. You wouldn’t be a partner in this firm if you weren’t a great business developer, great at client engagement. Keep what’s made you successful. Our job is to share with you what we learned from the research that Activators are doing differently, and your job is to think about what elements of that model do I want to import into my own approach.”

And so we actually find if you get a class of 20 consultants together, they might go in 20 slightly different directions, but at least they’re going in a different direction. And if you tell them, “We’re all going in one direction together,” the likelihood you get anybody to do it is like zero in a consulting firm. So, I think for leaders, you’ve got to really get consultants to want to be a part of that journey. You’ve got to see them as being able to tailor it for themselves. And I think it’s much more likely to stick and actually yield positive outcomes when you take that approach. So, answering I think part of your question, but maybe not all of it.

That’s great, Matt, and we’re going to leave it at that. I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing a bit about this. I definitely want to encourage everyone to go and grab a copy of your book or multiple copies. I mean, your work, this is the most recent book, but you’ve put out so many other ones, and I have so many additional questions for you, Matt, that we didn’t have time today to cover, but I look forward to exploring that more with you hopefully again. I do also want to ensure that people can know where to go. Where is the best place that you want to direct them to learn more about your work?

[01:04:45] – How to Connect with Matt

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I always encourage folks to do is connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewxdixon/. So let’s do the Activator thing. Tell me you heard me on Michael’s show and you’d like to be connected. And if you have a follow-up question, I’ll do my best to answer it. But the other thing is if you want to learn more about what we do, so our firm, DCM Insights (https://www.dcminsights.com/), our business is basically training partner-level and pre-partner level. So think managers, principals, associates, depending on the terminology different firms use, but the pre-partner level, teaching them Activator skills, right, and trying to help them to incorporate some of this model into their own client engagement approaches. We’re working with well over a hundred firms around the world now, from some of the biggest in the world all the way down to some pretty small boutique and niche firms. And so it’s been fun work, and there’s a lot more on our website, dcminsights.com, about what we do and the kind of programs we offer.

Awesome. Matt, thank you again so much for coming on.

Thanks, Michael. Appreciate the invite.

Important Links:

Matt Dixon
DCM Insights
Matt’s Research and Books
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